For someone who is attempting to make his living via the artful and constant use of the English language, I’m often uncharacteristically uncommunicative.

Such as I have been regarding this blog for the last few weeks.

Not because of the NaNoWriMo thing (which was neither raging success nor nightmare-from-beyond) or the experimental IndieGoGo thing. These things had their parts to play, but the real reason rests behind my barely open eyes.

I sometimes just don’t want to talk to anyone. There are times when I can go entire days without saying a word outside of day-to-day social niceties. When those times come, you can tell I really DO NOT CARE how you’re doing or what you did last weekend.

Why? Sometimes it’s because I just don’t have anything to say. In those times I hate to suffer the banalities of another person’s incessant babbling about irrelevant crap, so I save them the anguish of listening to my forced attempts at civility.

Sometimes it’s because I truly cannot stand to listen to the tripe most people pass off as conversation. This is the “I’m only waiting for my chance to speak” kind of ‘conversation’ you get from most people. No, I don’t give a rat’s rosy ass about Duck Dynasty, so shut the *&$@# up about it already and go away. Or just go away, as long as I don’t have to listen to this Bravo Sierra.

I’ve found that when I’m like this I need to be alone. My mind needs to go where no one knows my name, but where I know everyone else’s. That is oftentimes the world of whatever my WiP is.

This, Constant Reader, is my reason (not my excuse) for being absent from this blog for the last six weeks. I’ve been encased in a world other than our own and have not felt like communicating with anyone or anything outside of that world.

This will happen again, just so you know. I’ll go from “writing mode” to “creating mode” and you’ll know which one I’m in by the frequency of the Bliggety-Blog posts.

This is “writing mode” time, so you’ll hear from me a bit more in the next month or so, then I’ll drop into “creating mode”, go dark, and everyone will wonder what’s wrong with me.

It’s been quite a rough week, getting too little sleep and not enough butt-in-chair time for my NaNoWriMo.

Why? I am SO glad you asked. I’ve gone and done the stupid (or perhaps just the ill-advised) and decided that I’m going to not only NaNo myself into an early grave, but also try and crowdfund a new author anthology in the same month. What the HELL was I thinking? *you weren’t* SHUT UP, I know!

Not one to shrink from a challenge, I boldly went where angels fear to tread on the wings of love. Or something like that. GAWD my eyes feel like they have sand in them, but what did I do tonight? Futzed with a website I don’t need to have ready for THREE MONTHS. I’m not gonna have anything ready to sell until late January, but I HAD to get the fonts on the website just right. TONIGHT, not eight weeks from now.

Moral? Prioritize!

The countdown timer I put up on TAFpub.com tells me I have a little over 26 days until the Indiegogo campaign is over (but I think its messed up). So that means I have 24 days for NaNo which means I have to crank out 2100 words a day on a story I am only 1000 words into. I’ll have to re-write those as well, because I had an epiphany about NOT going back in time TWICE in one story through a flashback-within-a-flashback. Sounded like a good idea…for about 10 minutes. Then I realized it was “Inception” and said ‘eff it’.

So I’ll just play it out as a trilogy, making NaNo the first installment. I’ll tell you what it’s about when I get it all figured out. Not quite sure just how Lovecraftian I’m gonna get, ‘cuz it’s sure heading that way in the fevered little space behind my oh, so puffy eyes.

Yeah… the IndieGoGo campaign is at http://bit.ly/1aVVybo. If you would be so kind as to tell everyone you know about it 3 times a day for the next 25 days. LOL J/K… I mean 5 times a day *wink, wink*.

No, seriously, anything to spread the word without being a spammy jerk about it.

How do I feel about all this? Sometimes I feel like the Kid in the clip below, sometimes I feel like the gung-ho iguana. You can stop watching after 40 seconds, that’s all it will take.

So your happy little fingers are about to embark on the wondrous challenge of NaNoWriMo (AKA National Novel Writing Month) and your happy little writer’s mind has this sweet idea that’s gonna launch you over the 50,000-word finish line in, like, a week.

Good for you. Stay positive; you’ll need it.

So you log in and get to the “My Novel” screen and see this thing:

NaNoWriMo Genre Selection

ARGH! The audacity of them to make you know, and publicly declare the Genre already! What? Really? You do? Damn you.

Well for those of us who aren’t as sure as Ms Already-Know-My-Genre, here is some help in determining what your NaNoWriMo thingy’s genre is. We will bastardize “The Old Man and the Sea” for this exercise.

Consider this: ANY of these can be “Thriller”, “Mystery”, “Humor” or “Romance” (depending on your writing style) or, thanks to Rule 34, “Erotic Fiction”. Also, “Old Man” is generic for “Impact Character”, Like Ben Kenobi to Luke Skywalker or Dumbledore to Harry Potter.

In the spirit of full disclosure, while I am going to start my own publishing company, I have nothing against traditional publishers. I find a recent turn of events quite interesting and it is the subject of this article.

The publishing business is being challenged by self-pub/indie-pub and the old guard is nonplussed (thanks to The Passive Voice for the heads-up). They have been challenged for some time, but now it seems the ‘old school’ publishers are defending their paradigm more fiercely by attacking those who challenge them.

Much in the same way it is accepted political practice (denials to the contrary) to make a “heinous charge” against an opponent. The accusation carries more weight than the truth about the charge: accuse an opponent of something (even if demonstrably untrue) and that opponent becomes “That Guy Who…” for the rest of his life. You might remember the Duke Lacrosse thing? An extreme example, but you get the gist.

The current salvo against cutting out the middle-people and writing directly to one’s audience makes you the “Publishing Pajamahadeen”. You are apparently not worthy of being read by virtue of your inability to pass through the hallowed halls of the ‘old boys club’ and have a literary contract bestowed upon you. Such elitist tripe.

YOU, ya pajama-clad infinite-monkey, have no right to question, challenge or otherwise look directly at we mighty few who should, by right, determine what, when, how and at what price the public has access to new works of fiction. You are so lucky we’re giving you 7.125¢ per sale. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

–Said by no one, but heavily implied.

Perhaps the desiresof the actual reading public escapes them. Perhaps they fear this new “self-determined reader” will choose its own “Best New Authors” instead of waiting to be told who to read. Perhaps they already are…